New Warlock: Pros and Cons

“How lovely are the portals of the night, when stars come out to watch the daylight die.”
Thomas Cole

New Warlock: Pros and Cons

My new Warlock is coming along. Season Two has brought some nice upgrades but I still need to learn how to play. I’ve only raided twice this week and three times last week in Uldir. Yesterday saw my first Mythic Plus.

When we talk about our rotation it is about sustaining high levels of damage over a long period of time, sometimes up to twelve minutes. The designers work to make us break our play by making us move or shift to mobs.

Affliction Warlock is my specialization and it is still new. New enough that I’m not ready to try the other two choices. In fact, I’m still learning my pets who can add to my damage or interrupt.

We do burst damage well. We can hit hard and fast but that will wane down to almost (it feels like) a dribble until all of our cooldowns can line up again so a bunch of spells can be activated at once.

With our burst damage, this means in a raid that we are very keen on fight length and also Hero or burn phases, often holding on to things until needed. In a dungeon, we are not very good at AoE and so are not effective on trash mobs but we’ll shine on the very short boss fights.

Warlocks bring some unique utility. Our healthstones (lock rocks) and our summoning portal and our gateway portals are only found on Warlocks. We also have a spot that we can put the ground and we can teleport to that spot later!

I was surprised at the demand for the Soulstone. This can be placed on a player so that if they die, they can come back to life. This can also be cast on a dead player by the Warlock to bring them back to life. This battle rez is in demand!

As an engineer, of course I have Jeeves and (very soon) Reaves for repairs.

There will be updates as more is learned about this challenging class.

It is also your personal save in the open world (if somehow you let the tanking demon die). Problem is it wears in 15 minutes, so you have to track the buff all the time. Still, if there are too many mobs which you know will kill you both, you may manage to cast it on yourself.

The self-teleport to a spot was super useful in Tomb of Sargeras during Maiden encounter. When you’re sent flying, you just do your thing, and never suffer any falling damage. Could be used in similar situations.